“Analysis carried through to the end and skeptical distrust of all theory on the one hand and readiness to believe naively in detached fixed principles on the other, these are the characteristic of the bourgeois mind.” (pg. 410)

Bourgeois order yields the isolation of scientific studies; this specialization of thought reflects the change in social totality (pg. 411-12)

Power science creates over nature is not being exercised according to a unified purpose or plan, thus the general “struggle” is reified as destiny; perceptions of individual possibilities of action are stunted

“To the extent to which individual activity is circumscribed and the capacity for it eventually stunted, there exists the readiness to find security in the protective shelter of a faith or person taken as the vessel and incarnation of the truth. In particular periods of the rise of contemporary society, the expectation of steady progress within its own framework reduced the need for an interpretation that would transfigure reality, and the rational and critical faculties achieved greater influence in private and public thought. But as this form of social organization becomes increasingly crisis-prone and insecure, all those who regard its characteristics as eternal are sacrificed to the institutions which are intended as substitutes for the lost religion.” (pg. 413)

Bourgeois “choice” between idealism’s final truth and complete subjectivity

The dialectic surpasses the condition and adds to the “system” of truth

Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis; the conditioned is taken seriously – i.e. the “absolute” and “eternal” are seen as under constant development

Hegel as idealist; his work overlooks its own historical particularities and the reification/eternalization of his categories (pg. 416)

Hegel as relativist; “The dogmatic assertion that all the particular views which have ever entered the lists against one another in real historical combat, all the creeds of particular groups, all attempts at reform are now transcended and canceled out, the notion of the all-embracing thought which is to apportion its partial rightness and final limitation to every point of view without consciously taking sides with any one against the others and deciding between them – this is the very soul of bourgeois relativism.” (pg. 417-18)

“Formal” definition of truth related to how cognition corresponds with the object; this correspondence is always established by human activity and hence, is non-dogmatic (pg. 419)

“Hence, activity is not to be regarded as an appendix, as merely what comes after thought, but enters into theory at every point and is inseparable from it.” (pg. 420)

Thoughts’ meanings are dependent on the social condition at a particular time; at particular moments thoughts can change the world

“When the dialectic is freed of its connection with the exaggerated concept of isolated thought, self-determining and complete in itself, the theory defined by it necessarily loses the metaphysical character of final validity, the sanctity of a revelation, and becomes an element, itself transitory, intertwined in the fate of men.” (pg. 421)

To the degree that knowledge corresponds to the available means of cognition, it is true

Past categories are overturned through the historical change of the relationship between concept and reality; truth is advanced through human application

“The process of cognition includes real historical will and action just as much as it does learning from experience and intellectual comprehension. The latter cannot progress without the former.” (pg. 422)

Dialectic materialism transcends the contradiction between relativism and dogmatism (pg. 422-23); “…only that theory is true which can grasp the historical process so deeply that it is possible to develop from it the closest approximation to the structure and tendency of social life in the various spheres of culture.” (pg. 423)

In pragmatism, truth is “proved” in its fruitfulness (a la Epicurus, Goethe, Nietzsche, James, Dewey); lends to the possible illusion of a free competition between ideas (pg.426); worries about progressive forces and definition of terms – e.g. “life” – as socially defined are pertinent

“Corrective” Marxism: “Adhering to its proven teachings and to the interests and goals shaping and permeating it is the prerequisite for effective correction of errors. Unswerving loyalty to what is recognized as true is as much an impetus to theoretical progress as openness to new tasks and situations and to the corresponding refocusing of ideas.” (pg. 428); “The truth is an impetus to correct practice. But whoever identifies it directly with success passes over history and makes himself an apologist for the reality dominant at any given time.” (pg.429)

In pragmatism the verification of ideas and their truth merge; in materialism verification is merely historical evidence that ideas and reality correspond

“Practice” as criterion for verification is illustrative of bourgeois science (pg. 430-31)

“Categories such as history, society, progress, science and so on experience a change of function in the course of time. They are not independent essences but aspects of the whole body of knowledge at a given time, which is developed by human beings in interaction with one another and with nature and is never identical with realit evidence that ideas and reality correspond

“Practice” as criterion for verification is illustrative of bourgeois science (pg. 430-31)

“Categories such as history, society, progress, science and so on experience a change of function in the course of time. They are not independent essences but aspects of the whole body of knowledge at a given time, which is developed by human beings in interaction with one another and with nature and is never identical with reality. This also applies to the dialectic itself. It is the sum total of methods and laws which thought adheres to in order to copy reality as exactly as possible and to correspond as far as possible with the formal principles of real events.” (pg. 432)

The dialectic yields that every insight should be tested against the whole body of theory; regressive/progressive, good/bad, preserving/decomposing are inseparable

Marx’s critique of political economy yields present conditions of society (pg.433-34) – at least until concepts change (e.g. the general vs. individual of economic conditioning)

Logic’s static categories fail to reflect the critical junctures/leaps of history (pg. 436-37); “Concepts behave in the same way; considered individually, they preserve their definitions, while in combination they become aspects of new units of meaning. The movement of reality is mirrored in the ‘fluidity’ of concepts.” (pg. 437)

The open-ended dialectic requires the constant struggle of individuals with no theoretical guarantee of “progress” (pg. 438)

Current social order yields divorce of religion from correspondence with truth (pg. 439-43)

Marcuse’s “A Note on Dialectic”

Hegel’s negation: “The negation which dialectic applies to them is not only a critique of a conformist logic, which denies the reality of contradictions; it is also a critique of the given state of affairs on its own grounds – of the established system of life, which denies its own promises and potentialities.” (pg.445)

All facts are stages of one process – a subject/object totality

Hegel’s reality is a historical subjectivity of realization; freedom here is defined as one’s being as the subject of one’s own existence; freedom as the dynamic of existence

Dialectical thought begins with a state of “unfreedom”; “Here the principle of dialectic drives thought beyond the limits of philosophy. For to comprehend reality means to comprehend what things really are, and this in turn means rejecting their mere factuality. Rejection is the process of thought as well as of action. While the scientific method leads from the immediate experience of things to their mathematical-logical structure, philosophical thought leads from the immediate experience of existence to its historical structure: the principle of freedom.” (pg. 446)

Freedom as negation: “The progress of cognition from common sense to knowledge arrives at a world which is negative in its very structure because that which is real opposes and denies the potentialities inherent in itself – potentialities which themselves strive for realization. Reason is the negation of the negative.” (pg. 447)

“This is not ‘existentialism’. It is something more vital and more desperate: the effort to contradict a reality in which all logic and all speech are false to the extent that they are part of a mutilated whole.” (pg. 449)

Determinate negation establishes both the forces of destruction and future possibility

Reason was instrumental in creating intolerable conditions but is also its own corrective (pg. 450)

“From this stage on, all thinking that does not testify to an awareness of radical falsity of the established forms of life is faulty thinking. Abstraction from this all-pervasive condition is not merely immoral; it is false. For reality has become technological reality, and the subject is now joined with the object so closely that the notion of object necessarily includes the subject.” (pg. 450-51)

“The whole is the truth and the whole is false” (pg. 451)

Adorno’s “The Sociology of Knowledge and Its Consciousness”

Critique of Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction

Mannheim’s positivistic mentality of terms (pg. 453), vision of society as “selector” (454), and concept of elite as a given homogeneous group (454)

“The thesis of the primacy of being over consciousness includes the methodological imperative to express the dynamic tendencies of reality in the formation and movement of concepts instead of forming and verifying concepts in accordance with the demand that they have pragmatic and expedient features. The sociology of knowledge has closed its eyes to this imperative.” (pg. 459)

What theories regard or disregard determine their quality (e.g. the concentration of capital)

“The inadequacies of the method become manifest in its poles, the law and the ‘example’. The sociology of knowledge characterizes stubborn facts as mere differentiations and subsumes them under the highest general units; at the same time, it ascribes an intrinsic power over the facts to these arbitrary generalizations, which it calls social ‘laws’, such as the one relating cultural goods to the social status of those who produce them.” (pg. 460)

Confusion between causation and levels of abstraction (pg. 461) – only particulars are caused

Over assertion of rationality (in history) (pg. 463) while celebrating irrationality in ideology when leading to rational ends – i.e. the uncritical acceptance of “symptoms”

Social contradictions are currently self-perpetuating: “The real attraction of the sociology of knowledge can be sought only in the fact that those changes in consciousness, as achievements of ‘planning reason’, are linked directly to the reasoning of today’s planners” (pg. 464)

Marcuse’s “On Science and Phenomenology”

Contextualization of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology

Questioning of Western notion of Reason; science posited as “end” of reason

“Can Being and Reason be separated if cognitive Reason determines (the essence of being?)” (pg. 469)

Galileo fulfilled Reason’s “project” with the mathematization of nature – this yields the collapse of philosophy and divorce of Reason from ends; theory becomes a historical practice

The above collapse remains hidden to science

“What happens in the developing relation between science and the empirical reality is the abrogation of the transcendence of Reason. Reason loses its philosophical power and its scientific right to define and project ideas and modes of Being beyond and against those established by the prevailing reality. I say ‘beyond’ the empirical reality, not in any metaphysical but in a historical sense, namely in the sense of projecting essentially different, historical alternatives.” (pg. 470)

Science develops as an absolute; grounded in the measurability/calculability of geometry (hence, non-transcendent)

Science retains the empirical world: “(1) inasmuch as science cancels data and truth of immediate experience, (2) inasmuch as science preserves the data and truth of experience, but (3) preserves them in a higher form, namely in the ideational, idealized form of universal validity.” (pg. 472)

“In Husserl’s terms: The objective a priori of science itself stands under a hidden empirical a priori, the so called lebensweltliche a priori. Moreover, as long as this empirical a priori remains hidden and unexamined, scientific rationality itself contains its inner and own irrational core which it cannot master.” (pg. 473)

Husserl prescribes a “therapeutic” suspension of scientific truth/validity and the a priori understanding of the empirical world – i.e. the world as a given for an “absolute” subjectivity (pg. 474)

Marcuse’s criticisms: 1) is it possible to come to grips with the “original” state of subjectivity? 2) does Husserl merely restore Reason to the philosopher? 3) does philosophy share science’s same “historical” reluctance?